Red Sox Fans Get a Crack at Yankees

On a television in the corner, the New York Yankees advanced to the American League championship series, then left the field in Minneapolis as if they’d done it a thousand times before, which, to the people here, sounds like a low estimate.

Leaning on a beer tap in a pub near Copley Square, a young bartender who’d introduced himself as Dave and hadn’t seen near enough for such weariness, smiled thinly and announced, “That’s it, Yankees-Red Sox. Man, I don’t know if I can live through another one.”

Along the Amtrak route from Boston’s South Station to New York’s Penn Station the next morning, a four-hour rumble through Providence, Mystic and New London, the very tips of trees had gone crimson and golden and orange, nearing full-blown fall.

Here, they hadn’t heard the chants from Fenway Park, where Red Sox fans called out the Yankees, their heroes -- Manny Ramirez, Pedro Martinez, David Ortiz -- taking laps on the warning track late Friday night, the Angels threading through the Ted Williams Tunnel on their way home.

But, even along this bucolic corridor, and for a nation’s baseball fans, Yankee haters and Red Sox apologists, there will hardly be any avoiding the coming best-of-seven series, beginning Tuesday night at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx.

If Bud Selig’s wild-card design has its benefits, Yankees-Red Sox in mid-October is chief among them, George Steinbrenner’s “evil empire” resisting Boston’s recurrent losers, a fight more often settled long before the sycamores burn.

The game’s cornerstone franchises went seven games in this very format a year ago, ending on a manager’s misguided faith in his pitching ace and then a fat knuckleball hit into the night, the Yankees superior again.

It is the best baseball theater short of the World Series. Even then, the Yankees, perhaps spent by the ALCS last year, offered almost no fight against the Florida Marlins and lost in the World Series.

The Red Sox have not won a World Series since 1918, a fact that happens to grip their city and turn its masses cheerless and suspicious. And yet, before the first cork flew, and almost before Ortiz’s series-clinching home run cleared Fenway Park’s green wall, the people insisted a stake find the Yankees’ heart before a championship found their baseball club, “Let’s go S-awe-x.”

To call this an obsession is to undersell the passion of it. To detail Yankee domination, and New Yorkers’ glee over it, is too long a conversation. They just are, the facts and sensations bundled in a timeless world order, Yankees first, Red Sox somewhere behind, Bucky Dent hallowed, Ted Williams’ head iced in some stainless steel drum.

Other than that, it’s just another baseball series.

The Red Sox aren’t entirely alone in their fixation with the Yankees: they simply are most tortured by it. In a four-game beating of the Minnesota Twins in their division series, the Yankees twice bashed their way back from daunting deficits, Saturday from four runs down, after which Twin outfielder Torii Hunter said, “What can you say? We were ahead and they’re the Yankees.”

The same Yankees that bought Babe Ruth from the Red Sox, decades later stole Alex Rodriguez from the Red Sox. Theo Epstein, Boston’s general manager, reached a three-way deal that would have brought Rodriguez from the Texas Rangers last off-season, only to have the trade fall through because of a contract technicality. Weeks later, the Yankees swung a trade and, unwilling to unseat shortstop and captain Derek Jeter, moved Rodriguez to third base. Rodriguez hit 36 home runs in the regular season and batted .421 in the division series.

Booed in Boston after the winter trade collapse even as an innocent bystander in the talks, Rodriguez became the face of Yankee wickedness when he tangled with Red Sox catcher Jason Varitek in a July 24 game at Fenway Park. In the resulting melee, Martinez was momentarily ambivalent, septuagenarian Don Zimmer having left the Yankees for Tampa over a tiff with Steinbrenner.

So they arrive again at the doorstep of the World Series, the Yankees with their bats thumping and their pitching momentarily stabilized, the Red Sox confident they’ve got five more outs in them, the length by which they fell short a year ago.

It was, apparently, unavoidable, the postseason destinies of franchises built to battle one another.